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We the People: How the Pledge of Allegiance evolved to the version we have today

The Pledge of Allegiance is repeated by students across the nation as they start their days at school. It is announced by refugees and other immigrants who recite it during their naturalization ceremonies . The echoes of the pledge can be heard during Congressional sessions and other government meetings, including those of the Spokane City Council (at least before meetings became virtual in the pandemic).

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

“The pledge was initially rooted by the panic of mass migration and a nativist fear,” said Cornell Clayton, the director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service and a professor of political science at Washington State University. “It encouraged immigrants to appreciate their new homeland as they arrived from all over Europe.”

Washington state requires each school to have a visible flag on display during school hours. It is also requires for each classroom to have a flag on display to accompany the ritual recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the school day. Washington state does not require students to recite the pledge, but asks that “students not reciting the pledge shall maintain a respectful silence.” The law also says that the pledge or National Anthem “shall be rendered immediately preceding interschool events when feasible.”

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The Spokesman Review

Extreme heat, dry summers main cause of tree death in Colorado’s subalpine forests

Even in the absence of bark beetle outbreaks and wildfire, trees in Colorado subalpine forests are dying at increasing rates from warmer and drier summer conditions, found recent University of Colorado Boulder research.

Robert Andrus.
Andrus

“We have bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires that cause very obvious mortality of trees in Colorado. But we’re showing that even in the areas that people go hiking in and where the forest looks healthy, mortality is increasing due to heat and dry conditions alone,” said Robert Andrus, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the School of the Environment at Washington State University. “It’s an early warning sign of climate change.”

“It was really surprising to see how strong the relationship is between climate and tree mortality, to see that there was a very obvious effect of recent warmer and drier conditions on our subalpine forests,” said Andrus, who conducted this research while completing his graduate degree in physical geography at CU Boulder. “The rate of increasing mortality is alarming.”

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Phys.org
Yahoo!News
Greely Tribune
The Denver Channel
Las Cruces Sun News
Patch

Artist: Mural belongs to ‘everyone’

A year after the idea was first proposed to the Pullman City Council, a mural promoting racial equality is complete and can be viewed downtown on Main Street.

It contains the words “Black Lives Matter,” “End Racism Now” and “Pullman, WA — You Are Welcome Here” on a colorful backdrop of flowers and rolling hills.

Joe Hedges.
Hedges

“We are just over the moon,” project manager Joe Hedges, assistant professor of fine art, said about finishing the painting.

Hedges said the process has been a struggle, “but there were a lot of people in town that never really gave up and were inspired by larger cities and small towns nationwide that had come together to create some kind of public display of a commitment to ending racism.”

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Yahoo!News
Daily News

Cougs at the Olympics: Lisa Roman wins gold in rowing

Lisa Roman of Langley, British Columbia, who graduated from Washington State University with a bachelor of science degree in psychology and a minor in human development and sports management, won a Gold medal for Team Canada.

Roman rowed in the women’s eight. Washington State University has a massive women’s rowing program that is cranked out several high-level oarswoman.

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KHQ

Bacteria that live in the digestive tracts of animals may influence the adaptive trajectories of their hosts.

A few minutes from the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia sits a small peach orchard that’s home to some unusual experiments. Contrary to first appearances, the subjects of the experiments are not the peach trees themselves, each of which is protected by a two-meter-cubed tent of fine mesh material. Instead, researchers are interested in the hundreds of tiny fruit flies living on the trees and the even tinier bacteria living inside the insects’ guts.

Seth Rudman.
Rudman

The setup was designed with a deceptively simple question in mind: Do the microbes in an animal’s digestive tract help shape their host’s evolution? Washington State University evolutionary biologist Seth Rudman says that it would make sense if they did. “Microbiomes [can have] a huge effect on host fitness, and hence could have a huge effect on adaptive trajectories of populations,” says Rudman, who helped construct part of the site in 2017 while a postdoc in evolutionary ecologist Paul Schmidt’s lab at UPenn. Despite broad scientific interest in the microbiome, few researchers had tackled these kinds of evolutionary questions experimentally.

Rudman, meanwhile, has been carrying out more research in Drosophila and also plans to work with stickleback fish, a species commonly used in adaptive evolution studies, he says. Designing experiments that capture as much of a species’ ecology as possible will be particularly important, he adds, not only for understanding how microbiomes influence host genomes, but for determining the extent to which this influence matters, among all the other forces at play, in driving host evolution in the real world. “I think the jury’s out on that,” he says. “The data will hopefully guide us—and that’s the way science should go.”

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The Scientist